From The Great Hunger in the 19th century to the Irish Food Renaissance of today, cuisine has shaped and framed Ireland. There is a reason that a pub often functions as the center of a community, a big Irish breakfast is the quintessential first meal, and the small farms are some of the best around. And there are now many reasons to visit Ireland for the food! Below is a simple overview addressing the complexity of Ireland’s relationship to food. There is also a list of a few interesting resources for further reading if you are interested.

The Great Hunger

For several hundred years leading up to the 19th century Ireland had been an impoverished country; cheap basics formed the backbone of the population’s nourishment. For a long time and for the poorest, the main sustenance was the potato. It was filling and grew readily in the climate and soil.

Unfortunately, the country relied too much on the lowly potato. In the late 1840s, blight washed over most of the country’s potato crops, turning them into blackened goo. There were plentiful other crops, but they tended to be sold for more profit outside Ireland. So the masses began to starve.

The blight lasted for several years and became known as the potato famine, but in recent years its name has been changed – more aptly – to the Great Hunger, as there was no famine; there was plenty of food. It was just a lack of humanity.

It is estimated that about a million people died during the famine and two million emigrated – many to America.

However, undeterred by the recently ended blight, the Irish potato regained its stature as the turn-to staple and even today you should hold your surprise if two forms of the tasty tuber are presented on your dinner plate.

Hearty and cheap

The financial fortunes of the working class in Ireland didn’t change for a century and a half and affordable filling food fueled the country: meat, potatoes, milk, and bread. Eventually a full breakfast piled on the calories for a hard working day. It consisted of a selection of eggs, sausage, blood sausage (blood mixed in with the sausage innards), bacon (more like fatty American ham than American bacon), toast, beans and a piping hot cup of tea.

Stew was a cheap and filling dinner, consisting of whatever odds and ends were lying about. I had an Irish friend once jokingly describe to me his recipe for stew: “you put some meat and vegetables into a pot and boil them until they’re all the same color.”

The Irish weren’t as concerned about a variety of flavors in their daily meals as much as they were about filling up for heavy drudgery.

The Celtic Tiger

And aside from some pizza places, Chinese and surprisingly good Indian food in the latter half of the 20th century, that’s how some of the diet remained until the mid 1990s when the “Celtic Tiger” came roaring in.

With the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ceasing hostilities between the British and the Irish and the European Union forming into a financial powerhouse, Ireland was chosen as a country the Union would help bolster. European money flooded the country, helping to improve infrastructure and stabilize the economy, multinational corporations set up main offices in Ireland with their well-educated, enthusiastic, English-speaking workforce and for the first time in hundreds of years, the Irish people had money.

But like all booms, it didn’t last. The easy money flowing throughout Ireland dried up and the citizens, having expanded their palates during the brief prosperous years, looked around at what they had. What they discovered was that they possessed the elements necessary to create great food all along – pasture-raised animals, small-scale food producers, local farmers and an ingenuity familiar to underdogs the world over.

The Irish Food Revolution (or Renaissance if you prefer) was born.

In the past several years pride in Irish food has shot through the roof, so to speak. Chefs are fusing the essence of other cuisines into their own and creating a gastronomical wonderland that is taking unsuspecting international visitors by surprise.

Sure you can still order the full Irish breakfast or enjoy a locally farmed carvery lunch, but you can also join a “food trail” and sample cutting edge dishes from three or four up-and-coming restaurants in a row. You can drop in on one of the many food festivals cropping up across the country or sample any of its world-renowned pubs.

In short, you can start thinking of Ireland as a food destination.


Sources and recommended reading
The Course of Irish History, T.W. Moody and F.X. Martin
The Great Hunger, Cecil Woodham-Smith
Forgotten Skills of Cooking, Darina Allen
Irish Traditional Cooking, Darina Allen
Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum www.ighm.org (resources for educators and scholars)